If by "expensive" you mean "billions"... with profitability not nearly so assured.
You cannot simply build some of those things. Culture and good schools take decades to build.
You cannot simply build some of those things. Culture and good schools take decades to build.
Re: Olin College, I don't often hear it as often as Stanford probably because of the relative size of the marketing budget, but the software engineers who come out of Olin College are probably not paid so significantly less that a 30-40% reduction in rent wouldn't compensate.
Re: $Billions... Or a couple thousand software engineers organized to invest together.
Re: "You simply cannot build some of those things." Challenge accepted! Er, well, but I'm short about a billion dollars in order to attempt it. Know anybody who can help with that?
It's much, much easier said than done. It's still the work of decades and absurd amounts of money. Every freaking city of notable size in America has tried to dump money into getting their own local startup ecosystem going, and most of them have gone a lot of nowhere.
Stanford engineering: $74,467[1]
Olin: $78,074[2]
[1]http://www.nerdwallet.com/nerdscholar/grad_surveys/top-salar... [2]http://www.olin.edu/content/results/